A Look At Ubisoft’s Unreleased Know Your Friends Game

The struggles of the Wii U have been well documented. Some publishers saw the writing on the wall early, barely backing the console from the off. But that wasn’t the case with Ubisoft, although their support eventually waned to the point where they finished a game for the Wii U – but never released it.

That game was called Know Your Friends, a multiplayer party game not too dissimilar from the PS4 PlayLink game That’s You. It was being developed by a Ubisoft team in Paris, and they had asked Ubisoft Montpellier if they could use the same UbiArt Framework technology that was in development for Rayman Origins.

Footage of the game, its history and some of the divisions within Ubisoft at the time are covered in the latest Game History Secrets episode. As Liam Robertson outlines, players would essentially use the camera on the Wii U’s gamepad to create an in-game avatar, with that avatar being displayed in-game via a cut-out artstyle. The gameplay itself focused on players answering and asking questions about each other, a little like Fibbage 3‘s Enough About You game mode.

What’s interesting is that the decision to eventually kill the game, according to Robertson, was made by marketing. Ubisoft didn’t think that there was an audience on the Wii U anymore, given the console’s failure to hit the heights of the Wii.

But there’s an argument that the Switch has found favour in a way the Wii U never did. That said, the Know Your Friends team has moved onto bigger and better things: Ubisoft Paris went on to co-develop Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle.

For more videos about the history of various games and looks at cancelled projects, check out the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel here.


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